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Radio Propagation Model Considering Antenna Beam Tilt with Application to Small Cells

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Abstract

Antenna beam tilting techniques are commonly used to deploy small cells with reduced coverage compared than macrocells. This paper proposes a new statistical propagation model for small cells with electrical and mechanical antenna tilt. The proposed model combines the dual slope path loss model with the departure angle spread model for considering antenna beam tilt. The proposed departure angle spread model introduces a new parameter reflecting the azimuth spread of departure (ASD) angles in order to account for the change of transmit antenna gain by electrical and mechanical tilt. Through this approach, the antenna gain for each ray is separately computed by considering the transmit antenna beam pattern as well as the antenna beam tilt. We perform field tests to measure the receive signal power in the downlink of commercial Long-Term Evolution small cells with antenna tilt. Based on the measurement data, we find the statistically optimal ASD parameter using a grid search and calculate the antenna gain for each ray. Also, the overall transmit antenna gain is obtained by averaging antenna gains for multiple rays. To assess the accuracy of the proposed model, the estimation error is evaluated by comparing the measured receive signal power with the estimated value using a propagation model, and the performance of the proposed propagation model is compared with those of existing path loss models in terms of root mean square error deviation. Then, it is shown that the proposed model provides more accurate propagation estimation for small cells than existing models.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by Network Technology R&D Center of SK Telecom and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korea government (MSIP) (No. 2016R1A2B4013418). Also, this research was supported by the MSIP (Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning), Korea, under the University Information Technology Research Center support program (IITP-2016-R2718-16-0014) supervised by IITP (Institute for Information & communications Technology Promotion). The authors would like to thank H. C. Jeon and SK Telecom for providing measurement data for LTE RUs with antenna beam tilt.

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  1. School of Electronics and Information Engineering, Korea Aerospace University, Goyang City, 10540, Republic of Korea

    Jihoon Choi

  2. Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Kwangwoon University, Seoul, 01897, Republic of Korea

    Hyukjun Oh

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  1. Jihoon Choi
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  2. Hyukjun Oh
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Correspondence to Jihoon Choi.

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Choi, J., Oh, H. Radio Propagation Model Considering Antenna Beam Tilt with Application to Small Cells. Wireless Pers Commun 95, 3813–3828 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11277-017-4027-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11277-017-4027-4

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